I hope the school year has settled down for all of you and your students. It’s been pretty busy as usual, and MakeMusic is no exception. As you hope to see your students learn and grow every day, we are working to improve SmartMusic every day and improve your experience working with us in your classroom. To that end, after our first SmartMusic release in mid-August, we have made a few small updates. Today, I’d like to bring you news about the current update that we have just made available.

View assessment grades quickly

We’ve heard from teachers about problems they’ve had getting to assessment grades quickly without needing to score assignments (covered in this previous blog post). After a series of conferences with some of you affected by this, we’ve figured out and implemented three immediate solutions: you’ll be able to require a recording without having to grade it, you can see assessment scores in the grid once a student submits it, and we will apply the solution to anyone who has used “0” as a recording score to close the loop.

Finale-created SMP file transposition

In addition, we found out after the fact that Finale-created SMP files were requiring students to perform as written when they were turned into assignments. This was not intentional, and has been returned to the previous behavior for your assignment creation going forward. The fix also covers jazz improv and other affected content.

Rubric Export

There was also a problem when exporting a rubric where some of the cells were swapped with each other. That is also fixed and you can print out your created rubrics and see they match what you’ve created.

Moving Forward

We have other issues being fixed and our plan is to address the following problems within the next couple of weeks:

• There is inconsistent behavior with assignment due dates; it should be 11:59 pm (in your correct time zone) on the day it’s due.
• There are a handful of unusual time zone-related problems being fixed.
• Improved stability of the software, especially for Mac users.
• SMP and MP3 files from older versions aren’t properly copying over to the new version in some situations, although they haven’t been deleted.

I appreciate your ongoing support for SmartMusic and your dedication to the evolving nature of technology in music education. We’ll continue to enhance SmartMusic so that it is a seamless part of your routine, and thank you for your understanding as we take that trip together.

Please let me know in the comments below if you have additional concerns, I’m always happy to hear from you!